Not too long ago my husband told me an outrageous story a co-worker had told him about a boy who smuggled a penguin out of an aquarium in his backpack. He swore up and down the story was true, and he believed it was, but I wasn’t falling for it. I told him I was going to check it out on Snopes and that’s exactly what I did.
The result? It’s as I suspected. An urban legend.
The Premise
It’s told in different forms. The version Wayne told me was of a little boy who’d snuck off and had somehow snatched the penguin. But he didn’t mention if the boy was mentally challenged.
Some versions say the boy suffered from Down Syndrome, others claim he’s mentally challenged. Some even say it’s not a boy but a 25-year-old mentally challenged man with a child-like mind.
One particularly credible account claims the incident took place at Drayton Manor Theme Park in the U.K. (Which also has a zoo.) Others are vague and don’t specify a certain zoo, aquarium, or amusement park.
At any rate, in the fable the parents discover the penguin, call the zoo, the zoo doesn’t believe them, the parents insist they count their penguins and that’s when they realize one’s missing.
Real-Life Missing Penguin
According to Snopes, in 2005 a baby penguin named Toga did go missing from the Amazon World Park Zoo in Britain. There wasn’t any indication of a theft to explain his disappearance, but that’s how the news spun it.
The penguin was never found, but he could’ve escaped, been eaten, or just up and died without zookeepers ever finding his carcass.
Pre-2005
The 2005 story of the penguin gone missing from the zoo and all the hubbub around the hit documentary, March of the Penguins might have accounted for the resurgence in this tale.
But…the tale of a penguin being nabbed from a zoo has been around longer than that. Since 1993, according to Snopes. They found it in another collection of urban legends. (Interestingly, the boy in that one was described as an “overactive child.”)
Courtney Mroch writes about animals great and small in Pets and the harmony and strife that encompasses married life in Marriage. For a full listing of her articles click here.
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